South Carolina Lives Up to Its Expectations

While South Carolina is known for its touristy beaches and Southern cuisine, the Palmetto State is also notorious in the political world for stripping the layers of civility off of campaigns, revealing the darker underbelly often associated with politics.

The intensity of the attacks has escalated and the antics have become more questionable than in previous months.

“South Carolina is where the stuff starts to get more personal and these campaigns and candidates stop liking each other,” Reed Galen, a political strategist who worked on numerous presidential campaigns, said.

It’s a circular firing squad. The three leading presidential candidates in the Republican primary have dropped the etiquette and are fulfilling the stereotype that comes with South Carolina politics.

The candidates and their staff have been campaigning for nearly a year. The Iowa-nice is over. New Hampshire pride is so last week.

South Carolina has chosen the nominee in every election since 1980 except for the last one when the state voted for Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney. But that’s a record that candidates are well aware.

Of the six remaining candidates in the Republican field, all are competing there. Even Donald Trump has lived in the state for the past week.

It’s home to demographics different than Iowa or New Hampshire. It’s the first state where African Americans represent a significant percentage of the population. It is home to the highest percentage of veterans per capita. Northern retirees are mixed with the South Carolina born and bred and the evangelicals tend to vote on a plank more broad than just social issues. It’s also a window into the rest of the Republican-heavy rest of the South.

The state has a history of dirty tricks that Galen said have been far worse than what is happening this year.

That’s because the godfather of nasty political campaigns, Lee Atwater, is from there. He helped to create the South Carolina primary in 1980. At the same time he was ushering in racial politics when spreading rumors about former Texas Governor John Connally, who was challenging his boss Ronald Reagan.

Those attacks, meant to play into racial prejudices in the former capital of the confederacy, continued.

The most well-known instances include the 2008 Democratic race when President Bill Clinton played the race card on behalf of Hillary Clinton against Sen. Barack Obama.

In 2000, the team of George W. Bush spread rumors that Sen. John McCain fathered an African American child. Galen worked for Bush during that campaign and said that race “goes down as a very tough campaign.”

Galen notes that politics is more than just a sport in South Carolina. It has built a successful political class, whose livelihood depends on electoral outcomes.

“There are a lot of long standing local operatives that this is their bread and butter,” Galen said. “Winning is their job.”